Do you know what a crane is? Not the bird, the machine. They're operated via ropes, chains and/or pulleys, and at their core they’re actually composed of several smaller machines working in tandem.. Most of the time they're used for carrying heavy loads, and they can get pretty tall. Naturally, the saying 'the bigger they are, the harder they fall' applies. You can reinforce them with pneumatic stabilizers, supports, counterweights and all that jazz, needing more and more as it gets taller. Unfortunately the reinforcement you can offer is limited, meanwhile the loads and height are theoretically infinite. Eventually, it'll fall over, or something will break.
In many ways, Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (WOTR from here on in) is a crane, and the load is Owlcat's lofty ambitions. Even as I'm writing this, I'm not sure whether the game succeeds in hoisting them high or not.
There's a lot to this game. Even if we just spoke about the story in a vacuum, there are an incredible amount of plot threads - major and minor - running through and parallel to the main story that I can't really summarise them in a snappy tl;dr. Factoring in story-altering Mythic Paths, side quests, companion story arcs and all the mechanics? We'd be here for a while. At the time of this review my hour count is around 100~. That's not repeated playthroughs, it's just one, and I am well aware I missed a lot of content.
The first thing you see upon clicking "New Game" and selecting a difficulty is an infinitely complex character creator. This is both an omen of what's to come, and a filter. It seems simple at first, merely asking you for a portrait and race... Then there's everything else. Merely selecting something as simple as "Paladin" brings up a million options: What's your domain? Deity? Pick some feats. What's your character's background? Are they a normal member of their race or something else? Distribute some stat points, now some skill points. These aren't complaints, the complexity is great. There's a good vessel here for roleplaying and once you're familiar with the system the creation process is super intuitive.
There... are two problems with both of those - the roleplaying and the complexity - that we'll get to later. You may also notice that I specified "once you're familiar", and that's when the game's first real downside comes in: This game is not newcomer friendly.
While the game mercifully offers respecs for a fair price, the system is far from intuitive. For starters, levelling up does not immediately level up your chosen class. No, you have to pick the class again to level it up. This seems simple, right? And it is!
The problem begins to rear its head when multiclassing comes into play, and the game begins bringing up concepts such as Caster Level.
See, unlike in many other RPGs with classes/jobs/vocations/what have you, multi-classing is remarkably easy. Merely pick another class on level up, right?
When you read the phrase ‘caster level’, your assumption may be that it refers to ‘level of the caster’. I did too, and I’ve spoken to many people who made the same mistake. No, ‘caster level’ specifically refers to the level of the class from which a spell is derived.
Once you understand this, it’s clear as day. Until then… You may be tempted to put 1-3 levels into Sorcerer while playing as a Paladin to get some extra damage spells. You can do this, nothing is stopping you, but those spells will eternally be weak if they scale with caster level. Compounding this is the exceptionally low level cap: Only 20 levels are available to you, and they’re easily wasted while dicking around.
Again, the complexity on display is not a bad thing, and respecs are cheap - especially with how much loot you get. It’s just part of a larger issue with this game and onboarding, but we can talk about that when I cover gameplay.
As for the questing, I’ll say this: There are many games on Steam tagged as ‘choices matter’. Some of them in jest, some of them sincerely. Having played many of them, and many other games on other platforms/storefronts that purport to have ‘meaningful choices’:
Wrath of the Righteous is perhaps one of the only games I can think of where a lot of your choices have tangible, meaningful impacts on the story. Not just the main story, but side stories too. Even as late as the finale, things were popping up in response to dialogue choices I’d picked 40-50 hours prior.
This is not the modern RPG style of ‘choices matter’ either. You are not free to say and do whatever until the designated MAKE CHOICE prompts appear. Most things you do will come back to haunt you - for better or worse - later on. These appear early in the game and just keep going. An overarching theme of the game is that while your control over your own destiny is debatable, the consequences of your decisions are yours alone. Hell, NPCs even comment on your deity if it’s applicable.
Perhaps most impressively is that many of these choices are not binary, and oftentimes the player is given the choice to bail on something. Indeed, my pursuit of Lichdom in the main story was met with apprehension and a not-insignificant number of my allies begged me to stop as I cast off my humanity and defiled the dead. The option to bail was always there, yet I chose not to take it anyway. When the option was no longer there, and I felt horrified by the scorn thrust upon me or the consequences of my inhumanity, all I could think was…
I chose this.
The plot’s general outline is the same for everyone: The Worldwound has been dumping out demons for a century and you have to solve the issue. What really sets WOTR apart from other games and especially other RPGs is how much control you have over defining your character’s motives. Are they doing this as a bare-fanged power grab? Are they a zealot? Will they take extreme measures and cast off their humanity to win? How many ‘By any means necessary’ declarations do they have in them? Or are they forced into it?
The decision is in your hands. This is not The Witcher or FFXIV or your favourite story where the protagonist’s motivations are handed to you on a platter with no choice for a different serving.
Accentuating the story is the Mythic Path system; having received a mysterious but malleable grand power from an unknown source, you’re granted the choice to shape it how you will. These have an impact both on your character as a mechanical entity, but also the story. The power afforded to you and the shape it takes can act as a key, and like in real life not all keys fit all locks.
I played a Lich, so I can’t comment on the others, but I thoroughly enjoyed the personal story I witnessed. Playing as a Neutral Evil character, I decided to forsake my humanity and anything else in pursuit of closing the Worldwound. At first it was simply following the course of pragmatism, but eventually that wasn’t enough. Curious research gave way to new goals and with those came opportunities to command the dead.
But this is not Dragon Age: Inquisition, and the opposition are not idle. As they became more dangerous, I was met with no choice but to rise and meet the challenge. My allies whispered in my ear and begged me to reconsider, imploring me to stop what I was doing and hold onto my humanity.
I did not heed their advice.
The final act of the game was not triumphant. Iomedae’s glorious crusade had become a march of the dead, and many of my Good aligned allies deserted. The titular righteousness had deserted, and there were more corpses in my army than mortals by the time the credits rolled. Indeed, even party members deserted me for this. Many of whom I cared a great deal for, and enjoyed the company of.
By the end of the game, my allies were amoral fools, soulless pragmatists, and the eternal silence of death hanging over my base. This was both my punishment and my reward. I said up above that I was met with no choice, but the game was not going to give me the luxury of holding onto that particular delusion; my choices led me there. I, at every point, had the chance to stop.
WOTR’s strength in writing, however, comes from the characters more than the overall plot. Surprisingly for a game with a plot on such a grand scale, it is primarily driven by the machinations of its cast. This game reaches into topics I didn’t expect from an AA game and handles them with surprising nuance. Indeed, the characters themselves are multifaceted and people I’d dismissed as ‘boring’ or ‘one-dimensional’ turned out to be… well, not. Motivations and beliefs are laid out quite clearly, either upfront or through breadcrumbs, and by the end of the game only one party member (Nenio) struck me as shallow or one-dimensional.
Perhaps this game’s biggest strength is that it avoids a pitfall many other party-based games stumble into and never climb out of: There is no ‘The [Trait] Guy’. I’ve been playing RPGs - CRPGs in particular - since I had my own computer, and even the best of them have a party that can be boiled down to “the pragmatic one”, “the just one”, “the wildcard”, etc etc. Whenever those characters broke from their established ‘role’ it was always an out of character moment meant to show the gravity of the situation.
There’s none of that here. Characters you usually agree with will oftentimes make a statement or suggestion you find abominable, and sometimes the party members you think are assholes will be right. This is only compounded by interactions between party members, wherein the dynamics and ideals clash in a way that feels natural. I am being deliberately vague so as to avoid spoilers, but around act 3 the game truly took me off guard by having me go “Ah sh*t, [party member I hate] is actually dead on the money” a few times.
This luxury is not exclusive to the party, with many of the main and supporting cast being just as fleshed out. If a character has a portrait, they’re guaranteed to bring nuances and surprises to the table, but even many of the ‘faceless’ NPCs are nothing to scoff at. While the game does have its one-note characters, it’s rare for the more substantial storylines to feature tropey characters and the vast majority of the game’s story is spent dealing with characters who are a realistic composition of beliefs, traumas, ideals and neuroses.
Except Nenio. f*ck Nenio. Worst CRPG character.
We need to talk about Nenio. Not her as a character, but what she represents.
Do you remember my question about cranes? Well, I asked it to get you thinking about the process of lifting weights, and how you just cannot lift certain things without the mechanism - or you - starting to buckle. It’s a basic application of the laws of physics
Yeah, well, WOTR is a crane and it’s trying to lift Owlcat’s ambitions. For as much as I just gushed over the game, it’s definitely straining to hold them aloft. This game aspires to be and do so much that it was impossible for it to pull it all off cleanly.
One thing WOTR glaringly aspires to be is funny. It’s why I mentioned Nenio; she’s emblematic of the issue, often torpedoing serious scenes with annoying quips and dragging other (better) characters into her irritating one-note gimmick. That she’s a genuinely unpleasant person without any justification does not help.
Unfortunately, Nenio is not the only part of this problem. I’m not a particularly big fan of stories trying to be funny in the middle of a setpiece with heavy gravitas and a serious tone - it’s why later Final Fantasy XIV content irked me - and this game does it a lot. Not quite as often as FFXIV or, god forbid, Marvel movies, but there were more than a few eye-rollers. It’s particularly grating to be in the middle of a fairly grim, serious dungeon only for that one whimsical song to start playing and inform me that I’m going to bear witness to some utterly banal attempts at humor.
Perhaps the worst part is that WOTR is a funny game, but it’s often in the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments and it rarely occurs when the game is trying. Interactions between party members have more intentional and accidental humor than most of the designed Funny Scenes.
…You know, to be entirely honest for a moment: I’ve been writing this review for two days. It’s the 4th of June right now and I finished it near about the 1st. In all this time, I’ve been putting off talking about the gameplay. As a general rule worth keeping in mind; I don’t like being unceasingly negative to things that don’t deserve it. It’s easier for me to rag endlessly on Warframe or Daemon x Machina or Daemonhunters or MASS Builder or just… any game that’s very quantifiably bad through and through. But for works clearly made with passion, love and an earnest ambition to be amazing, I struggle.
And… so does WOTR, once you look past the writing.
‘Adaptation’ is a word described by the Cambridge Dictionary as meaning:
the process of changing to suit different conditions:
In the context of videogames, adaptation often means taking a plot or mechanic from another medium. Tabletop games, as massive mechanical behemoths that have a few hundred interlocking systems regardless of rulebook, are often subject to this to avoid players being overwhelmed or turned off by the complexity. When Shadowrun was adapted to videogame format with the Shadowrun Returns trilogy, much was excised and cut down for the sake of a better videogame experience. When Warhammer 40k made its close-to-tabletop debut with Gladius, naturally much was trimmed down or streamlined both to prevent these issues appearing and to keep the game from being ‘outdated’ as newer editions come out.
With this is in mind, I would not say WOTR has ‘adapted’ the Pathfinder systems. Rather, it has adopted them nearly wholesale and merely provided a GUI for many actions. This, in a vacuum, is not a bad thing. There is a critical lack of CRPGs that’re willing to hit you with complex systems, often going for more palatable one so as to prevent the onboarding process alienating people.
No, the problem comes from how the system interacts with the more videogame-y numbers.
Let’s take combat spellcasting for example. In XCOM or Shadowrun or Divinity Original Sin, you merely click it and the game resolves the calculation.
Here? We have dice rolls, the staple of any tabletop.
There are a few dice rolls…
There are a lot of dice rolls.
When casting a spell, first you must roll to make a concentration check and then roll for the spell to succeed, which is two rolls to begin with. Then you must roll to actually hit, which is a roll calculated against a target’s armor class and spell resistance - so two more separate rolls, with the latter being affected by the caster’s spell penetration. From there, targets will make a fortitude and/or will save to resist further effects. Any of these can fail in sequence, and every single roll is affected by some other stat.
The overreliance of Dice Rolls is, in itself, not bad. The actual problem is how many additional bonuses are heaped on, owing to the fact that this is a videogame which can deal with far bigger numbers than a D20 can. “Characters make saving rolls'' wouldn't be an issue if enemies did not regularly appear with AC stats of around 50~ or higher and had access to feats and traits that give them bonuses to saving throws.
Perhaps in an admission of their own stat bloat, the devs quietly sneak you armor and shields with sizeable AC ratings early on. I wish I could say ‘these are just boons, you don’t really need them’ but the game spikes hard and fast. It is perhaps an unstated rule of videogames that any scenario where a token force defends against a swarm be populated by trash mobs, but WOTR offers you no such mercy and makes sure to dump a horde on you every now and then - with one such encounter taking place about 6 hours in.
In other RPGs (beside looters), minmaxing is seen as a self-imposed diversion and rarely considered mandatory for the main path. The focus is, after all, on playing a role. In WOTR, it’s considered standard, at least on Normal and above. This isn’t a game where you can safely dick around, pick some traits that seem fun, and experiment in the course of a playthrough. No, you have to commit or else you’ll eventually wall against an enemy with an AC/deflect value you simply cannot surpass.
In other RPGs, some options are simply “not-good” relative to the overall difficulty. In WOTR, some options are just outright bad and it can take a few hours of playtime to realise something’s off. Branching off of this, while the aforementioned class system does let you multiclass with ease, it is in fact a horrible idea to ‘try out’ other classes without knowing what you’re doing. XP is at a premium in this game and there’s only 20 levels, with a lot of classes having very powerful 20th level abilities.
Let’s say you’re a Sorcerer, and you decide that being squishy in melee is dull and that you want a level in Fighter to get a weapon feat. Valid on paper, and maybe even on the tabletop, but consider: The game expects you to be getting stronger on an upward level most of the time. In taking a level in Fighter, your caster level is not raising and you’re not getting any new spells. While you do have access to the weapon you chose, you have no additional weapon feats to augment it and having spent a few levels in Sorcerer means you’re likely missing out on that sweet Basic Attack Bonus and the bonus damage from Strength - a dump stat for Sorcerers.
The cruellest part of this system is that sometimes, multi-classing only a few levels into something is a valid choice. Referred to as ‘dipping’, many build guides will point you towards picking up 1-3 levels in something like Mutagen Warrior for the sake of a hefty buff. But, as with most of this game, it can only be known ahead of time.
This further extends to your party members. ‘Canon’ party members (i.e, provided by the story and not made via the mercenary system) are best left on autolevel, as trying to experiment with them will only continue the cycle of hurting. It is unfortunately a bad idea to build for a versatile party, with it often being a safer choice to simply make everyone a monoclass specialist and then rotate them out as needed.
The sole exception are party members who come with multiple classes; most notably Regill, who (as per the Hellknight lore) starts with levels in Fighter Armiger and Hellknight and a proficiency in the gnome hooked hammer. Refuse to respec them at your peril.
So we have stat bloat, restrictive class building, endless dice rolls that can make combat feel miserable and sharp/sudden difficulty spikes. Surely there can’t be more?
Sigh… Alright, let’s talk about weapons and feats for a second. At the start of the game, you’ll be given the option to pick a feat. Among these is Weapon Proficiency, and clicking it unfurls a MASSIVE list of weapon types. Everything from simple sh*t like spears and longswords to exotic weapons like curved elven blades, the estoc, and many more.
If you’ve played other CRPGs that let you pick a weapon archetype, you might think that speccing into one in character creation will simply give you one of those weapons, right?
Wrong, unfortunately. You get proficiency in that weapon type but are otherwise stuck with the pre-generated loot. Which, to your potential dismay, will likely not conclude any of the more exotic weapon types. If you spec into Longswords or Bows or Spears or anything common you’ll reap instant results, but good luck if you picked an Elven Curved Blade feat.
I bring this up because it really exemplifies WOTR’s habit of letting you make explicitly wrong gameplay choices that actively hamper the experience. These options aren’t inherently bad, and certainly serve metagaming/repeat players, but for a first timer they’re blatant traps.
Traps… traps… traps… Alright let’s talk about character select forcing.
Almost every major level has traps in them. Traps are disarmed by characters with high Trickery, and like every other stat in this game, the requirements to safely disarm them skyrocket over time. Unless you yourself have Trickery as a class skill, you will inevitably be forced into bringing a character who does have it. You might think this is common sense, and it is!
But you only have 6 party member slots. Including yourself, that’s 5. Add in a trap disarmer, that’s 4. Ah, but you absolutely need a dedicated healer as well. We’re down to 3… God, you need a tank as well, so that’s 2 left. You will inevitably need a caster as well to deal with enemies who are nigh unbeatable in melee, so you have one free slot left-
Wait, do I have ranged attacks? Ah sh*t.
Early in the game you’re given Seelah, a Paladin who will in most paths stay with you. She can tank a lot of damage, hits respectably, and carries a number of useful buffs and debuffs if you keep her as a Paladin. You get Camellia soon after, and she’s a ‘dodge tank’ who can be useful but will otherwise melt to a well placed hit. But hey, at least she sticks around!
A short while later, you’re given Lann or Wenduag. Strong physical ranged attackers who can burst down anything. After them, you’ll likely run into Woljif who is both a rogue and someone with high trickery. A few random events later and Nenio (regrettably) appears as a dedicated offensive caster. Blah blah blah, Daeran and Ember appear as your healers.
I tell you this because to me it is the game admitting that you shouldn’t really bother on a varied or interesting party and instead opt for a rigidly defined one. You can try to get by without the archetypes I listed above, but good luck doing that. There are only so many potions, scrolls and lockpicks in the game world, yet spells and trickery are functionally infinite.
Everything I listed above is a contributing factor to the game’s worst part: Combat length. My god, fights are long.
This isn’t so bad in the early game, where the more methodical pacing of Act 1 leads to fewer fights overall. Trash fights are quick, and more substantial ones are long but not annoyingly so. Unfortunately this goes out the window with Act 1’s final area, which features a gauntlet of fights against decently strong enemies and each fight lasts a while. To the point where it was surprising to find the final fight only took a few minutes, but in this sole instance there is a good plot reason.
As it happens, Act 1’s finale was an omen for the future. WOTR has an incredible amount of combat, and as early as Act 2 even trash fights begin to take a lot of time. Due to stat bloat, a surge in enemy counts, and the introduction of enemies with resistances that often nullify a certain party member, they can DRAG. Unlike say, Shadowrun: Hong Kong (to use one example), the number of fights per area is rarely if ever in the singledigits. Main story levels have a nasty habit of throwing you into a fight and then placing another one about a hallway away… Like six or seven times. By Act 3 I was already sick of fighting, having done too many fights that took an age even when they were against ‘trash’ enemies (who still had high AC and access to debilitating spells). This game isn't short, my first run took about 105 hours and that's with missing a lot.
So, after deciding that I simply hated one aspect of the entire game, I lowered the difficulty and switched to auto mode. It just stopped being fun past a certain point, and I was reassured that Acts 4 and 5 are much worse on that front. This game is merciful in that regard, you can turn off or dial down things that irritate you.
Except resting, a mechanic which I grew to hate so much that I nearly got into modding just to remove it.
As you adventure through WOTR’s world, you accumulate fatigue and become… well, Fatigued. Continue further and you become Exhausted. Both debuffs inflict major stat penalties, and annoyingly they accrue uncomfortably fast. You can rest for free to cleanse them, but doing so builds up Abyssal corruption which… debuffs you significantly, and then kills you. Thus demanding a rest at a safe zone.
Your mileage may vary, but I just can’t stand this system. On such a huge world map, it feels as though it serves little purpose than to arbitrarily restrict exploration. It only gets worse in Acts 3 and 5 - which see a significant expansion to the explorable space on the map - and it felt like I was becoming exhausted every few steps. This sadly isn’t something you can just power through, either; Exhausted debuffs most major stats by -6. Combine that with stat bloat and it’ll just turn your entire party into invalids.
Lastly on the gameplay side, there’s the Crusade mode. Some would described it as a poor man’s Heroes Of Might And Magic, and they’d be right. I understand the developer’s intent, they clearly wanted you as a crusader to actually partake in the crusade, but the execution is just awful. While it supplements lots of other systems (including the fantastic writing, which it provides more of), the actual gameplay of Crusades is a boring numbers-game version of chess where you have little meaningful choice beyond “Spam archers and a tanky melee unit, have your General dump spells on the enemy”. This does not get better in Act 5.
It’s rather telling that while the use of mods to skip certain elements (like rest) is contentious, the most common response to “I don’t like Crusades” is “Get a mod to skip the fights”. There is an option to automate it in the base game, but this locks you out of research projects, several powerful items and even the resolution to some character arcs. It’s a bad option, don’t pick it.
Much of my vitriol for Crusades comes from how interwoven they are with the rest of the game. There is some exceptional writing in the Council events but to get them requires Crusade progress. Want to explore the map? Your Crusaders have to clear the way first. Want to progress the story? Yup, Crusades. Because of the aforementioned issues with the built-in Crusade auto-mode, and the sheer amount of the map gated off by Demons, this truly is a mechanic you cannot safely avoid engaging with safely without mods.
It’s a shame, too, because the actual Crusade in the story leads to some of its best bits. Even with a demigod at the helm, you’re not immune to logistics, morale and politics. How you navigate those minefields can influence the outcome of character arcs and even the ending, to say nothing of how enjoyable the council discussions on each issue are. They even react to your mythic path, like the Lich path featuring events involving necromancers, vampires and followers of Urgathoa. I just wish they were attached to an actually enjoyable system.
This review begins with an analogy about cranes, and the reason my mind homed in on that particular comparison is because cranes are the sum of their parts. One part being out of line or faulty can (literally) bring everything else crashing down. WOTR is an incredibly ambitious game, probably the most ambitious CRPG ever made and released, but… I don’t actually know if it can support its own ambitions.
Again, the writing and characterization (not Nenio) are f*cking phenomenal, and mythic paths are obscenely cool. The voice acting is solid (except Nenio) and the game does an excellent job at making you feel like part of a well-realized world. It is perhaps one of the most painstakingly accurate depictions of a tabletop system outside of actual tabletop sims like Talisman or Tabletop Simulator, and…
I just hate actually playing it, you know? The combat is good in theory, but it’s a huge drag and it felt like my punishment for chasing the story. The writing itself started to feel like a reward for suffering.
“Congrats on suffering through like 9 Shadow Volaries and cultists who have a ton of crit-heavy weapons, here’s a great rumination on whether power as an entity can be inherently good or evil.”
Ultimately, I still recommend WOTR. Mods and difficulty settings can alleviate most of your grievances, and the writing is worth whatever unavoidable grievances you may have. Hell, you might even like the things I hate! I’ll probably replay it in the future because my curiosity about the other mythic paths outweighs my aversion to the gameplay. I wish I could’ve praised the story and writing more, but there’s a lot to spoil on both the quest and character fronts.
WOTR is a bright shining star of CRPGs and it’ll be hard to top it in the future, but like every bright light… that sure is a dark shadow over there, huh- No wait, it’s just Nenio.
